DesertStandard

Having been in a number of sales offices over the last few years I always get a chuckle when managers start talking about the ’sales team’. This always seems like a total oxymoron right up there with Military Intelligence and Working Vacation. By their very nature salesmen are individuals driven by ego and selfishness since it is their job to get the customer to yes, or maybe not. While movies like Glenn Gary Glenn Ross, Wall Street, and Boiler Room, to name a few, romanticize this notion the truth is that its a grey area.

Still the notion of a ’sales team’ is always humorous to me because the same people who spend all the time talking about it and have all the control over it never really do anything to foster it. I am of course talking about the sales manager(s). Sure they have the weekly meeting where they bring up things that should just be emailed and let people as questions that never get answered, but other than this they really don’t do much in terms of creating a team environment. That is until I read a post on SocialText.com by their VP of Sales talking about Collaborative Intelligence:

In our sales wiki today, we capture all prospect discovery calls (using a template that already contains the questions we use for discovery). Each rep has a dashboard that displays all of their quarterly discoveries and territory plans. These dashboards also display all their existing customers, and allow them to pivot to all the unstructured data related to that account like account plans, org charts, all the stuff you never end up putting in Salesforce.com. Our service team uses the wiki to manage the entire post-sales process for implementation, documenting ongoing account reviews, customer feedback, and more.

This is unreal stuff for anyone who has worked in a sales department, well at least for me. I have always thought that stuff like this would be really great and useful, but have never seen it happen before. Having people put all of this information up in a form that everyone at the company can review and utilize is just genius. Taking all of the individual effort and insights and sharing them with the group only makes everyone stronger. This is a culture of Generosity and as Keith Ferrazzi talks about in ‘Never Eat Alone’ it is how true relationships are built.

Naturally I have applied to work there. =)

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 5:43 pm and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.